When 3Tera was launched back in 2004, one of the big buzzwords was utility computing, which had just trumped grid computing as the hot new thing. Today, we have cloud computing, and that's the word so many companies - including 3Tera - are wrapping their marketing efforts around. But 3Tera and its AppLogic virtual infrastructure management tool keep doing what they've always done, even as the buzzwords change.

Investigators probing the crash site of Steve Fossett's Bellanca Super Decathlon - in mountainous terrain near the town of Mammoth Lakes, Mono County, California - have confirmed the wreckage contains "minimal" human remains, but sufficient for DNA identification.

'Daddy needs to tell you about an exciting new service called WebWise'

BT subscribers who are invited to take part in its new trial of Phorm's internet monitoring and advertising system will be responsible for telling anyone who uses their computer that they could be being tracked online - whether they opt in or not.

What would you hear if you were on Mars? A slight hiss from whatever wind there might be and then your own death rattle, probably - but the Phoenix Mars Lander is aiming to find out what other sounds the red planet has to offer.

Those of you who might have wondered just how Google maintains its global supremacy in privacy-busting black ops, and prevents usurpers deploying snoopmobile fleets of their own to photograph the entire planet for exposure to the unwashed masses, might be surprised to learn that the method owes little to hi-tech and more to traditional canine techniques to warn off rivals:

Virgin Galactic has rather churlishly rejected a $1m offer to allow an unnamed company to shoot a zero-grav grumble flick aboard its SpaceShipTwo vehicle - thereby depriving science of crucial research into how humanity might procreate during the very long haul to the nearest Earth-like planet once we've finally screwed this ball of dirt we call home.

Next Thursday, 9 October at 7pm, our very own Andrew Orlowski will be tackling the perennial issue of digital piracy - live and dangerous at the highbrow Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.

David Pakman, CEO of eMusic, will leave the subscription service at the end of the year. Pakman explained his departure on Monday, and yesterday disclosed that his next destination would be VC firm Venrock.

It's been a busy few days for the renowned US military crazytech research bureau, DARPA*. The Pentagon wack-profs have announced plans to develop a new drug which will acclimatise troops to thin mountain air very fast, and unveiled plans to make small, portable magnetic-resonance Tricorder-style scan gizmos. They have also committed an extremely serious acronym crime.

The Reg reader poll run earlier this week as part of our agile development workshop produced a set of results that do not paint a particularly inspiring picture. When asked how distributed software development was managed within organisations, almost half told us things were not that great. About a third gave feedback indicating that they were just about doing okay, but only one in five said things were managed well.

There was time when incoherent rage was directed solely at we poor Reg hacks, long before the days of Democracy 2.0 and our ill-advised decision to allow the hoi polloi to chip their two bits' worth into the hotly-debated topics of the day.

A British man and a German man have been indicted by a US federal grand jury for launching a campaign of denial of service attacks against two US-based home satellite television vendors on behalf of a rival company.

It makes for one heck of a project mission statement. Explore the nature of dark matter, chart the Solar System in exhaustive detail, discover and analyze rare objects such as neutron stars and black hole binaries, and map out the structure of the Galaxy.